The U.S. is far behind its global rivals in the race for energy supremacy in a low-carbon world. To catch up, it is pinning its hopes on companies such as Ion Storage Systems, a next-generation battery company started in a University of Maryland chemistry lab with a $574,275 federal grant. WSJ: At a new factory outside of Washington, D.C., Ion Storage will be among the first companies in the U.S. to produce a new kind of faster-charging, longer-lasting battery. The company's batteries also don't catch fire; combustibility is a problem that has bedeviled the industry's batteries for years. The U.S. government and private investors have poured cash into battery startups hoping to catch up to the Chinese, Japanese and South Korean companies that dominate battery manufacturing. The goal is to leapfrog their rivals with better technology. There is an urgency for U.S. battery makers to get products to market because big customers such as auto makers are lining up long-term suppliers. If there are no U.S. options, the buyers will go abroad. "This is our last chance to get it right" in the U.S., said Ricky Hanna, Ion Storage's chief executive and the former executive director of battery operations at Apple. [...] The company is one of several startups focusing on solid-state lithium-ion batteries. These batteries differ from most lithium-ion batteries today because the electrolyte that conducts a charge between cathode and anode is solid, rather than a flammable liquid. That allows faster charging, less risk of fire and longer battery life. Ion Storage scientists demonstrate their batteries' durability by cutting them open with scissors or putting them before an open flame.

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In the most important environmental case in more than a decade, the Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments in a dispute that could restrict or even eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to control the pollution that is heating the planet. From a report: A decision by the high court, with its conservative supermajority, could shred President Biden's plans to halve the nation's greenhouse emissions by the end of the decade, which scientists have said is necessary to avert the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. "They could handcuff the federal government's ability to affordably reduce greenhouse gases from power plants," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. But the outcome could also have repercussions that stretch well beyond air pollution, restricting the ability of federal agencies to regulate health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more. [...] At issue is a federal regulation that broadly governs emissions from power plants. But in a curious twist, the regulation actually never took effect and does not currently exist. The legal wrangling began in 2015 when President Barack Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, his chief strategy to fight climate change. Citing its authority under the Clean Air Act, the Obama administration planned to require each state to lower carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector -- primarily by replacing coal-fired power plants with wind, solar and other clean sources. Electricity generation is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, behind transportation.

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Though the Russian government has tried geofencing access to crucial web sites, the Jerusalem Post reports that two Russian government web site still went offline Saturday — the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense. "Gosuslugi, Russia's web portal of state services, went offline on Saturday night as well, with the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media telling TASS that the site is facing cyberattacks on an 'unprecedented scale.'" Meanwhile, the Washington Post interviews 22-year-old Alex Horlan, a Ukrainian cybersecurity expert in Spain "helping take down some of Russia's most powerful websites — including state media and even the official page of the Kremlin." The attacks he and others are helping to carry out on Russian websites are part of a wide information war in the background of the much larger conflict here, as Ukrainians target Russian websites to rewrite the narrative Moscow is presenting to Russians back home. "We are creating an IT army," Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted on Saturday. Horlan is a cybersecurity expert who recently launched an app called disBalancer that helps take down scam websites by overwhelming them with online traffic. He has redirected his team's efforts in recent days to instead target Russian websites he says are spreading dangerous disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.... Thousands of people are joining Horlan and others' efforts to target the Russian sites, with around 2,000 logging into his app at any given time, he said. The main challenge is that many are losing WiFi when air raid sirens force them to retreat to underground bunkers.... Volunteers are gathering information on attacks and casualties to fact check and challenge Russia's version of events, posting messages on Telegram and other Russian social media platforms [according to Liuba Tsbulska, a Ukrainian analyst and activist who has tracked Russian disinformation for eight year]. Others work to educate international audiences or produce patriotic content. Some also target Russian military and intelligence officers, flooding their emails and other platforms with messages. Volunteers are reaching out to the mothers of Russian soldiers to convince them to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring their boys back home. In Kharkiv, after reports that Russian troops and armored vehicles entered Ukraine's second largest city early Sunday, one local Telegram channel with more than 400,000 subscribers urged people to continue to document the adversary's movements as a way to aid Ukraine's forces in the area. In one message, the Truha Kharkiv channel asked citizens to "carefully film and send information about the movement of Russian troops to our channel. This is vital to the defense of our city." Another message instructed citizens on how to make molotov cocktails.

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This week the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming announced plans for a "hydrogen hub," reports the Associated Press. The states hope to use $8 billion in recently approved federal infrastructure funding to make hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — "more available and useful as clean-burning fuel for cars, trucks and trains." Hydrogen can be derived from water using an electric current and when burned emits only water vapor as a byproduct. The fuel could theoretically reduce greenhouse emissions and air pollution, depending on how it's obtained. As with electric vehicles, however, hydrogen's potential has been limited by infrastructure. Lack of fueling stations limits the market for hydrogen-fueled vehicles. Few hydrogen-fueled vehicles limits investment in producing and moving hydrogen.... Critics point out that as it's now produced, hydrogen isn't green, carbon-free or unlimited. Currently nearly all hydrogen commercially produced in the U.S. comes not from water but natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While advocates say using fossil fuels to produce hydrogen now can help to develop a clean industry later, environmentalists are skeptical. "It's essentially a push for expanded oil and gas development. More oil and gas development is completely at odds with the need to confront the climate crisis and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels," Jeremy Nichols with the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based environmental group WildEarth Guardians said by email. Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming rank seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, for U.S. onshore gas production. Utah also is significant gas-producing state, according to the Energy Information Administration.

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GitHub's Copilot is an AI-powered autocompletion tool for coders, but the FSF has come up with a new way to describe it: Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). But they also feel the service "immediately raised serious questions for the free software movement and our ability to safeguard user and developer freedom" — which is why last July they'd put out a call for papers from the free software community. And they're now announcing the results: [W]e concluded there were five papers that would be best suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to help guide our actions in the search for solutions.... The papers contain opinions with which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) may or may not agree, and any views expressed by the authors do not necessarily represent the FSF. They were selected because we thought they advanced discussion of important questions, and did so clearly.... The five papers are: Copilot, copying, commons, community, culture Copyright implications of the use of code repositories to train a machine learning model If software is my copilot, who programmed my software? Interpreting docstrings without common sense On the nature of AI code copilots The FSF adds: "If this subject is of interest to you, we recommend you read this selection of papers and share your thoughts and feedback. Several of the authors have agreed to participate in follow-up discussions which will be held via IRC, LibrePlanet Wiki, and LibrePlanet Discuss mailing list.... Whether or not you are able to attend any of the live events, we encourage you to contribute to the discussion on the wiki and mailing list. As stakeholders in free software, the preservation of user freedom and copyleft, we would like to engage the community in any possible actions that must be taken."

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America's power grid consists of 3,000 public and private sector power companies, with 55,000 substations scattered across the country. On the CBS News show 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker notes that each grid hold grid-powering transformers — then tells the story of "the most serious attack on our power grid in history" on the night of April 16, 2013: For 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain link fence. Jon Wellinghoff: They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation. At the time, Jon Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the U.S. high voltage transmission system.... [T]he attackers had reconnoitered the site and marked firing positions with piles of rocks. That night they broke into two underground vaults and cut off communications coming from the substation. Jon Wellinghoff: Then they went from these vaults, across this road, over into a pasture area here. There were at least four or five different firing positions. Bill Whitaker: No real security? Jon Wellinghoff: There was no security at all, really. They aimed at the narrow cooling fins, causing 17 of 21 large transformers to overheat and stop working. Jon Wellinghoff: They hit them 90 times, so they were very accurate. And they were doing this at night, with muzzle flash in their face. Someone outside the plant heard gunfire and called 911. The gunmen disappeared without a trace about a minute before a patrol car arrived. The substation was down for weeks, but fortunately PG&E had enough time to reroute power and avoid disaster. Bill Whitaker: If they had succeeded, what would've happened? Jon Wellinghoff: Could've brought down all of Silicon Valley. Bill Whitaker: We're talking Google, Apple; all these guys-- Jon Wellinghoff: Yes, yes. That's correct. Bill Whitaker: Who do you think this could have been? Jon Wellinghoff: I don't know. We don't know if they were a nation state. We don't know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could in fact plan out this kind of a very sophisticated attack.... A few months before the assault on Metcalf, Jon Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts... The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations.... In 2016, an eco terrorist in Utah shot up a large transformer, triggering a blackout. He said he'd planned to hit five substations in one day to shut down the West Coast. In 2020, the FBI uncovered a white supremacist plot called "lights out" to simultaneously attack substations around the country. While the threats can also come from the internet, America's deputy national security advisor for cyber (formerly at the NSA) tells the reporter "We've taken any information we have about malicious software or tactics that the Russian government has used, shared that with the private sector with very practical advice of how to protect against it." The reporter later spoke to the president's homeland security advisor, who points out there's no specific national regulation for the power plants, arguing that one of the system's strengths is "the resources for energy are different in different regions." But they also acknowledged the federal government is now setting standards "in a variety of arenas."

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The creator of Apple's Swift programming language stayed involved in the Swift core team and Evolution community... until this week. Though he'd left Apple more than five years ago, "Swift is important to me, so I've been happy to spend a significant amount of time to help improve and steer it," Lattner wrote in an explanatory comment on the Swift community forum. "This included the ~weekly core team meetings (initially in person, then over WebEx)..." The tech news site DevClass notes Lattner is also "the mind behind compiler infrastructure project LLVM," but reports that "Apparently, Lattner hasn't been part of the [Swift] core team since autumn 2021, when he tried discussing what he perceived as a toxic meeting environment with project leadership after an especially noteworthy call made him take a break in summer." "[...] after avoiding dealing with it, they made excuses, and made it clear they weren't planning to do anything about it. As such, I decided not to return," Lattner wrote in his explanation post. Back then, he planned to keep participating via the Swift Evolution community "but after several discussions generating more heat than light, when my formal proposal review comments and concerns were ignored by the unilateral accepts, and the general challenges with transparency working with core team, I decided that my effort was triggering the same friction with the same people, and thus I was just wasting my time." Lattner had been the steering force behind Swift since the language's inception in 2010. However, after leaving Apple in 2017 and handing over his project lead role, design premises like "single things that compose" seem to have fallen by the wayside, making the decision to move on completely easier for language-creator Lattner. The article points out Lattner's latest endeavour is AI infrastructure company Modular.AI. And Lattner wrote in his comment that Swift's leadership "reassures me they 'want to make sure things are better for others in the future based on what we talked about' though...." Swift has a ton of well meaning and super talented people involved in and driving it. They are trying to be doing the best they can with a complicated situation and many pressures (including lofty goals, fixed schedules, deep bug queues to clear, internal folks that want to review/design things before the public has access to them, and pressures outside their team) that induce odd interactions with the community. By the time things get out to us, the plans are already very far along and sometimes the individuals are attached to the designs they've put a lot of energy into. This leads to a challenging dynamic for everyone involved. I think that Swift is a phenomenal language and has a long and successful future ahead, but it certainly isn't a community designed language, and this isn't ambiguous. The new ideas on how to improve things sounds promising — I hope they address the fundamental incentive system challenges that the engineers/leaders face that cause the symptoms we see. I think that a healthy and inclusive community will continue to benefit the design and evolution of Swift. DevClass also reported on the aftermath: Probably as a consequence of the move, the Swift core team is currently looking to restructure project leadership. According to Swift project lead Ted Kremenek... "The intent is to free the core team to invest more in overall project stewardship and create a larger language workgroup that can incorporate more community members in language decisions." Kremenek also used the announcement to thank Lattner for his leadership throughout the formative years of the project, writing "it has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with Chris on Swift." In 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

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Remember when Google threatened to leave Australia if the country implemented a "news media bargaining code" forcing social media platforms to pay news publishers? Wired reports: Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021... One year after the media code was introduced, Google has 19 content deals with news organizations and Facebook has 11, according to [Australia's communications minister Paul] Fletcher. Now countries around the world are looking at Australia's code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of "news deserts" — communities that no longer have a local newspaper. Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the U.S. and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals. The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia's code works. "We know it works, we can see the evidence," says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. "The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers," Google said in a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws.... The criticism of Australia's system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate.... Concerns about the code's flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. "We're locking down the incumbent publishers, and we're locking down Google and Facebook's dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides," says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada's Carleton University.... Yet Canada's news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada.... They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains — 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. "We've got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink." Deegan agrees the code isn't perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, "this is a badly needed Band-Aid."

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Disney World's "Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser" hotel will be expensive and immersive, writes SFGate. ("For two adults, the starting price is about $5,000. For three adults and one child, it's nearly $6,000.") And while the hotel doesn't open to paid guests until Tuesday, free previews have already been given to online influencers: Reviews so far are generally positive — particularly praised are the character actors who carry the experience — with a few caveats. Because the hotel itself, called the Halcyon, is supposed to be a luxury cruise ship in space, the biggest complaint is that rooms are small and cramped... For some, the lack of windows may add to a sense of claustrophobia. Hotel rooms have a digital display showing outer space and no view of the real outside world. Folks needing some fresh air can, however, visit an outdoor communal space called a "climate simulator." Reporters from the YouTube channel Disney Food Blog, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers, were invited to the media preview. In their review of the hotel, they put it thusly: "Disney went all-in on an experience that seemingly puts only the wealthiest guests inside a windowless bunker for two full days." But most reviewers agreed that guests will be spending minimal time in their room anyway. The two days are packed with lightsaber training, clandestine rendezvous, elaborate entertainment and exploration of the ship. Guests need to download an app for their smartphone to chat with characters on board, receive their missions and learn their storylines. This was the other major drawback: If you're an introvert, this may be the wrong trip for you.

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SFGate reports: The largest plane ever built has been destroyed at an airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said Sunday.... The Antonov An-225 Mriya was built in Ukraine in 1985 when the nation was still controlled by the Soviet Union. It has six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built. It was created as a strategic airlift cargo craft, carrying Soviet space orbiters, but was later purchased by Antonov Airlines. It's since been used to airlift oversized cargo and large loads of emergency aid during natural disasters.... Although Kuleba's tweet confirmed the plane's demise, Antonov says it is still gathering information on the massive plane's fate.

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On Thursday the head of Russia's space agency "warned that new sanctions imposed on his country could have dire consequences for the International Space Station program," reports Space.com (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm): "Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?" read one of the tweets from Roscosmos Director-General Dimitry Rogozin, which was translated by Rob Mitchell for Ars Technica senior space editor Eric Berger, who shared Mitchell's translation on Twitter. Russia and the United States are the major partners in the ISS program, which also includes Canada, Japan and multiple European nations... NASA, however, told Space.com later Thursday that civil cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in space will continue, particularly with regard to the ISS. But Rogozin struck a much different tone, suggesting that the new sanctions could potentially result in the ISS crashing to Earth in an uncontrolled fashion. (The Russian segment of the ISS is responsible for guidance, navigation and control for the entire complex, according to the European Space Agency. And Russian Progress cargo craft provide periodic orbit-raising boosts for the ISS, to ensure that it doesn't sink too low into Earth's atmosphere....) Rogozin also stressed that the ISS would deorbit naturally without periodic reboosts courtesy of Progress freighters.... Just days ago, however, a Cygnus spacecraft built by aerospace company Northrop Grumman arrived at the ISS with a mandate to perform the program's first operational reboost, which may eventually transfer this capability to U.S. vehicles as well. Business Insider reports that Thursday's tweets from the head of Russia's space agency also included a dire hypothetical. "If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?" On Saturday Elon Musk "responded by posting the logo of his company, SpaceX." Musk appeared to confirm that SpaceX would get involved, should the ISS fall out of orbit. A Twitter user asked if that's what the tech mogul really meant, to which Musk simply replied: "Yes." NASA, meanwhile, said it "continues working with Roscosmos and our other international partners in Canada, Europe, and Japan to maintain safe and continuous ISS operations," in a statement to Euronews.

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Harvard's School of Public Health has an announcement... "Multiple sclerosis (MS), a progressive disease that affects 2.8 million people worldwide and for which there is no definitive cure, is likely caused by infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), according to a study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers." Epstein-Barr virus has already been linked to some forms of cancer. But now, as the New York Times put it, "New research proves a virus — one that almost all of us have — 'causes' multiple sclerosis." (More than 90% of adults have the Epstein-Barr virus, and "The very ubiquity of Epstein-Barr has made it especially difficult to isolate as a causal factor...") Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and elsewhere, however, devised a novel way to carry out that study, and they published their findings in January in Science. U.S. military recruits, a group of more than 10 million people, are screened for H.I.V. when their service starts and biennially thereafter. Their blood serum samples are then archived in the Department of Defense Serum Repository and can be retested for other pathogens. Between 1993 and 2013, the researchers identified cases of M.S. among active-duty U.S. military personnel. Then they tested their first serum sample; their last sample before M.S. onset; and one in between. They found that of 801 soldiers with M.S., 800 were positive for Epstein-Barr.... "In practical terms, if you're not infected with E.B.V., your risk of M.S. is virtually zero," says Alberto Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard and a senior author of the Science study. "After infection, your risk jumps by over 30-fold." The odds of that increase having occurred by chance are less than one in a million.... That was the strongest evidence yet that Epstein-Barr initiates M.S., but it didn't explain why. Just over a week after the Science paper came out, though, Robinson and colleagues published their own paper in Nature that demonstrated how the virus triggers the disease in some people. Epstein-Barr produces proteins that mimic a protein in the myelin sheath, they found; when the immune system makes antibodies to attack the virus, they also attack the myelin — "the insulation around your neurons," as Robinson puts it. "Like electrical wires, if the insulation gets stripped off, it short-âcircuits," he says. "That's what results in M.S." This protein mix-up, though, can only explain about a quarter of M.S. cases. And while the Science paper concludes that Epstein-Barr is the "leading cause" of M.S., Cohen says he wants to be careful with the word "cause." He thinks the study proves that the virus is a necessary precondition for M.S., but the fact that so many people have Epstein-Barr and so few of them get M.S. demonstrates that other factors, very likely including genetic susceptibility, must play a significant role in the development of the disease.... What is exciting about the discovery that Epstein-Barr is necessary for M.S. is that it raises the prospect that a vaccine could prevent that disease — as well as other serious conditions — even if we never understand precisely why the virus behaves as it does in a given individual. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news!

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Long-time Slashdot reader IHTFISP brings this report from SciTechDaily: Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that the axis of rotation of a black hole in a binary system is tilted more than 40 degrees relative to the axis of stellar orbit. The finding challenges current theoretical models of black hole formation. The observation by the researchers from Tuorla Observatory in Finland is the first reliable measurement that shows a large difference between the axis of rotation of a black hole and the axis of a binary system orbit. The difference between the axes measured by the researchers in a binary star system called MAXI J1820+070 was more than 40 degrees.... [T]he researchers were able to determine the direction of the axis of rotation of the black hole very accurately. As the amount of gas falling from the companion star to the black hole later began to decrease, the system dimmed, and much of the light in the system came from the companion star. In this way, the researchers were able to measure the orbit inclination using spectroscopic techniques, and it happened to nearly coincide with the inclination of the ejections.... The results published in Science magazine open interesting prospects towards studies of black hole formation and evolution of such systems, as such extreme misalignment is hard to get in many black hole formation and binary evolution scenarios. "The difference of more than 40 degrees between the orbital axis and the black hole spin was completely unexpected. Scientists have often assumed this difference to be very small when they have modeled the behavior of matter in a curved time space around a black hole. The current models are already really complex, and now the new findings force us to add a new dimension to them," Poutanen states.

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Countries imposing sanctions on Russia also depend on it for oil and natural gas, notes Slate's web editor. "Noah J. Gordon, an adviser at the Berlin-based, climate-focused think tank Adelphi, thinks there's an opening here for Europe to take a different route — to pursue more energy self-sufficiency not by building out gas reserves, but by expanding its renewable energy sources at a faster pace." Noah Gordon: [O]nly about 15 percent of Germany's huge gas consumption — almost all imports — is used in power production, and only 15 percent of German power is generated from gas. Most of that gas from Russia or elsewhere is used for heating buildings and in industry.... I think this crisis has really changed the terms of debate. There's a lot of talk today on massive European mobilization to build heat pumps so that Germany and the rest of Europe could heat their buildings with electricity instead of gas, and to renovate buildings for energy efficiency. This is a thing called the EU Renovation Wave, which is a buzzword that can now really get going.... [T]he answer is to reduce fossil fuel use as much as we can. There might not be a wartime mobilization to build weapons for this conflict, but there could be to build heat pumps and to renovate buildings. That's really the way out of this, and to get the clean energy to back it up.... Building a heat pump today isn't going to cut emissions on its own, and you need clean electricity to power the heat pumps, or you haven't made that much progress. But at least with heat pumps and efficiency, you're not locking in future fossil fuel use.... [Y]ou could get a paradigm shift after this, like we did after 1973 and the Arab oil embargo with a greater focus on alternative energy, such as nuclear, and an energy efficiency drive back then in the EU and Japan and even the U.S. in terms of car fuel economy standards.

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VentureBeat reports: In Ukraine today, Mykhailo Fedorov, the country's vice prime minister, announced on Twitter, "We are creating an IT army." "We need digital talents," wrote Fedorov, who also holds the title of minister of digital transformation — sharing a link to a Telegram channel where he said operational tasks will be distributed. "We continue to fight on the cyber front." On the Telegram channel, the IT army reportedly posted its list of Russian targets — which were also translated into English "for all IT specialists from other countries...." On Friday, Christian Sorensen, a former U.S. Cyber Command official, told VentureBeat that "hacktivists around the world [will be] working against Russia, because they are the aggressor.... I think things will ramp up against western targets, but Russia and Belarus will be targeted by these groups even more" said Sorensen, formerly the operational planning team lead for the U.S. Cyber Command.... [O]n Friday, a Bloomberg report said that a hacker group that was now forming to bring counterattacks against Russia had amassed 500 members. And today, we have the announcement of Ukraine's IT army — potentially including assistance from hackers around the globe. "Whether sanctioned or not, official or not, if people have or can get the right information, know-how, and desire — they can make an impact," Sorensen said on Friday, prior to the announcement of Ukraine's IT army. "We'll have to wait and see what they are able to do." The next day Reuters reported that the official website of the Kremlin, "the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin....was down on Saturday, following reports of denial of service (DDoS) attacks on various other Russian government and state media websites. "The outages came as Ukraine's vice prime minister said it had launched an 'IT army' to combat Russia in cyberspace." But the Independent reports that the cyberattacks may have been even more extensive: Ukraine's state telecommunications agency announced on Saturday that six Russian government websites, including the Kremlin's, were down, according to The Kyiv Independent. The agency also stated that the Russian media regulator's website had gone down, and that hackers had got Russian TV channels to play the Ukrainian music. Note from Slashdot: the blue/purple bar means the story was posted automatically from the firehose without a Slashdot editor selecting it. This happens when a story gets a huge amount of upvotes in the firehose.

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From the Hindustan Times: BitConnect founder Satish Kumbhani was indicted by a U.S. grand jury on charges he orchestrated a global Ponzi scheme that raised $2.4 billion from investors in a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment platform, according to a Justice Department statement. Kumbhani, 36, was charged in San Diego with misleading investors about BitConnect's purported propriety technology... BitConnect used money from new investors to pay earlier ones and also operated as an unlicensed money transmitting business, the U.S. said. More details from the San Diego Union-Tribune: Investors around the world, including those in San Diego, were encouraged to buy BitConnect's open-source, decentralized cryptocurrency, called BCC, using Bitcoin for the purchase. Investors would then "lend" their BCC tokens to Bitconnect, which would purportedly invest the proceeds using proprietary technology known as the Trading Bot and Volatility Software. The technology was supposedly designed to trade automatically, and profitably, by buying and selling on the volatility of Bitcoin, according to the indictment. But much of the technology remained a mystery to investors. When someone asked for a demonstration at an event in 2017, Kumbhani was evasive: "So you ask me very hard question," he told one interviewer. He added later, "For privacy reasons we are not disclosing anything..." Prosecutors say the investments weren't being traded as promised but were instead used to pay out earlier investors, typical of a pyramid scheme. The funds would also be used to pay BitConnect's army of promoters, who would market the investment opportunity on social media and at live events. Glenn Arcaro, described by prosecutors as "one of the most prolific and successful" of the bunch overseeing the United States, also formed his own cryptocurrency education course called Future Money. But the course was really a way to funnel potential investors to BitConnect, prosecutors said. Arcaro, a Los Angeles resident, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in September for his role in the scheme. After shutting down abruptly, Kumbhani then "directed his network of promoters to fraudulently manipulate and prop up the price" of BCC, "to create the false appearance of legitimate market demand..." according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice: Kumbhani is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodity price manipulation, operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. If convicted of all counts, he faces a maximum total penalty of 70 years in prison.

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"We all know Linux is written in C," writes ZDNet. "What you may not know is that it's written in a long-outdated C dialect: The 1989 version of the C language standard, C89." But that's about to change, explains long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool: Linus Torvalds has decided that Linux will move to the C11 standard starting with kernel 5.18.... Linux had planned to move to a newer standard eventually with C99 being the next version. However a recent patch to a security problem revealed that there could be problems with C99. In order to patch a potential security problem with Linux's linked-list primitive speculative-execution functions, it was found that C99 would require the iterator must be declared outside the loop which would expose it to another security problem. Since C99 was not very popular, it was agreed to skip it and use C11. Backwards compatibility with most compilers like gcc should allow for an easily transition of most of the code. ZDNet adds that "This isn't as big a transition as it may seem. C89 still has almost universal support. Because any C compiler is backward compatible with earlier versions, you won't have any trouble compiling or running a C89 program. So, a C11 compliant compiler won't have any trouble with any C89 legacy code."

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